Search results

With increasing demands placed on Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to engage with the Sustainable Development (SD) needs of its local communities, Community-Engaged Teaching and Learning (CETL) has emerged as a valuable tool to help HEIs cater to such demands. This study aims to explore and examine CETL practices at HEIs across the globe, particularly in relation to its role in furthering the SD agenda.

This study adopts an extensive review of academic literature as an investigative tool to probe different CETL approaches being practiced by HEIs, especially the ones aligned with sustainability.

The study revealed discernible findings on four aspects: (i) curricular strategies and pedagogical interventions adopted under the ambit of CETL for advancing the SD agenda, (ii) engagement and sustainability linked competencies and learning outcomes derived in the process, (iii) challenges constraining CETL practices at HEIs, and (iv) strategies for strengthening the same and ensuring its impactful implementation.

This study accrues value in illuminating the practice, role, impact and implications of SD oriented CETL practices, given that there are limited studies on the subject. It also contributes to the global call for HEIs to catalyze sustainable social development by making their teaching and learning functions more community-engaged and socially relevant.

The study aims to co-create a “priority action roadmap for women's economic empowerment” based on women's top priorities to charting recovery directions. Doing so contributes to the growing body of knowledge on COVID-19 literature in at least four areas: assessing COVID-19 impacts on women entrepreneurs; mapping these impacts with four interdependent women's entrepreneurial ecosystem components; innovating a co-creation methodology based on remote participatory research; and providing a replicable model to perform action-oriented research in the context of COVID-19 impacts.

A co-creation methodology is proposed, combining systems-thinking and remote participatory research to engage women entrepreneurs and institutional stakeholders to prioritize impact, response actions and recovery needs in the wake of COVID-19. A ranking exercise using the analytic hierarchy process was used to derive ranking and assess user inputs' consistency.

The study exemplifies the integration of participatory methods and mathematical tool to engage stakeholders in prioritizing recovery work. PARWEE action items ranked by entrepreneurs and vetted by institutional stakeholders cover: access to finances, capacity building, health care, public and private partnership, marketing opportunities and formation of active advocacy groups to voice out women entrepreneurs' needs to institutional stakeholders. Results show a slight difference in the ranking of priority actions between experience owners and fresh starters.

This study innovated a new co-creation methodology for remotely engaging stakeholders of the women's entrepreneurial ecosystem, which is grounded in evidence and provides a replicable model for performing action-oriented research.

The paper explored students-staff classroom co-creation and students' involvement in out-of-class engagements as means of fostering employability skills in higher education institutions (HEIs). The paper aimed to present an alternative but equally effective means that HEIs can leverage to foster relevant 21st Century employability skills among undergraduates using day-to-day in-class and out-of-class activities and other non-formal campus activities.

The study adopted descriptive survey design. A total of 350 undergraduates who participate in out-of-class activities were purposively selected from seven (7) faculties. An instrument designed by the author was used to gather data for the study. The instrument was subjected to Cronbach Alpha analysis for item-by-item consistency and it yielded the reliability co-efficient of 0.88. Data collected from the respondents were analyzed using descriptive statistics of frequency count, mean and standard deviation.

Interactive classrooms, where students and lecturers co-create to provide solutions to problems enhance students' self-esteem, problem solving, analytical, communication and leadership skills amongst others. It was also found that students who got involved in one or more out-of-class activity on campus acquire specific competencies such as networking, collaboration, communication, leadership, multidisciplinary thinking, etc.

Due to a limited sample size, it might be inappropriate to generalize findings. Researchers are encouraged to test this proposition further.

The paper highlights the need for HEIs to leverage student-staff co-creation and out-of-class engagement in their bid to produce employable graduates.

This paper clearly presents alternative but effective means of fostering employability in HEIs.

Our work adds to the debate regarding higher education graduates’ skills required in the labour market in Germany and beyond.

Using Q-methodology and the accompanying narrations, we explore German employers’ and employees’ views (N = 26) on characteristics required at the entry level.

Our findings show three areas of the labour market with different skill requirements. Whereas the first area, “The world of rules”, applies more likely to the professions and academia, the two other areas, “The middle field” and “The people-oriented and critical market”, can be found throughout the labour market. The disciplinary affiliation does not play a role. In all three areas, soft skills are crucial and specialised knowledge is only highly valued in the area of “The world of rules”.

In contrast to previous findings, we do not focus on singular skills. Instead, we focus on skill sets and discuss their relevance from the background of their usability.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the association between local entrepreneurs’ perception of the city’s decline and their place attachment (measured in terms of commitment to the declining city and sense of how the declining city compares to other cities).

The authors surveyed entrepreneurs in a relatively small sample (N = 105) from a declining city of about 78,000 residents in the USA.

The authors found significant inverse correlations and found that, after controlling for length of residency, the entrepreneur’s perception of the city’s decline predicted lower place attachment. The authors also tested a moderation hypothesis and observed that, whereas professional-service entrepreneurs with both stronger and weaker perceptions of the city’s decline showed similar place attachment, non-professional entrepreneurs showed significantly more variation, displaying both the highest place attachment when weak in perceptions of the city’s decline and the lowest place attachment when strong in perceptions of the city’s decline.

The authors discuss implications for place attachment, place image and place branding research, as well as for the study of place context’s effects on entrepreneurship.

Results hold implications for place branding’s participative development and for reasons to expect some difficulty in place branding when the context is a declining city.

Relative to prior research in place management, the research features a neglected segment of the city’s population, business owners, to study place attachment. Relative to prior entrepreneurship research, the authors advance the study of context’s effects on entrepreneurship by extending it to the place context of declining cities, which are not usually featured in entrepreneurship studies.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a growing body of research on information systems security, by studying open source alternatives for cloud computing. Several questions have been raised about the reliability of these promising but ambiguous offers, as the adoption of a cloud solution within an enterprise is generally accompanied by a change in the chief information officer (CIOs) role and loss of expertise.

The research uses a mixed research methodology: a first step is based on a questionnaire survey to investigate the security aspects of open source and understand the role of CIOs in the migration process. The investigation involved nearly 800 companies operating in the cloud computing sector in 16 European countries between November 2015 and January 2016. Then, this paper completes the research with a qualitative study by examining the activity of two sample companies.

Research confirms that open source cloud solutions offer a higher level of security than proprietary solutions. It is also noted that the role of CIOs is delegated to a third external actor: a transition CIO. Transition CIO is the guarantor of the strategic and security choices of small and medium enterprises.

These findings have important implications and great value to managers and cloud computing providers, in terms of formulating better cloud computing solutions. This study can also assist in increasing their understanding of the new role of CIO in the migration process to cloud computing.

This study contributes to the body of research on cloud computing. It is first of its kind with its focus on open source alternatives. Another novelty of this research is that it suggests a new conception for the CIOs role in the migration to cloud computing. Finally, the findings of this study would serve as a European market study to different companies interested in cloud computing.

This study aims to develop a better understanding of how online health community (OHC) members with different health literacy (HL) levels benefit from their participation, through the analysis and comparison of their resource integration (RI) processes. It investigates through a RI lens how the vulnerability of community members – captured as their level of HL – affects the benefits they derive from participation.

Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to investigate the effects of healthcare service users’ vulnerability. Data were collected about their profiles and levels of HL. Furthermore, 15 in-depth interviews were conducted.

The study demonstrates how low levels of HL act as a barrier to the integration of available online health resources. Participation in OHCs appears less beneficial for vulnerable users. Three types of benefits were identified at the individual level, namely, psychological quality-of-life, physical quality-of-life and learning. Benefits identified at the community level were: content generation and participation in the development of the community.

This study has implications for the understanding of how service users’ activities affect their own outcomes and how the vulnerability of users could be anticipated and considered in the design of the community.

This study aims to examine the effect of audit quality (auditor expertise and discretionary accruals) on financial communication quality and to distinguish the moderating role of corporate governance mechanisms (board size, CEO duality, board gender diversity and block ownership) on this relationship.

Linear regression is used to analyze the annual reports of 150 nonfinancial firms that belong to the CAC All-tradable index for the period 2015–2023.

The empirical results show that auditor expertise has a positive and significant effect on financial communication quality. Furthermore, board size reinforces the negative effect of discretionary accruals on financial communication quality. However, CEO duality and block ownership attenuate the positive effect of auditor expertise on the dependent variable.

Our research covers three areas of research, i.e. audit quality, corporate governance and financial communication research. It presents the moderator role of some governance mechanisms on the relation between audit and financial communication quality. Furthermore, it aims to identify best practices in the governance system that attempt to facilitate and improve the positive impact of audit quality on the quality of financial communication, which increases stakeholder confidence in the firm. We caution readers from generalizing the findings of this study, as our study is based on a well-developed sample. Also, it is limited only to annual reports to measure the financial communication index without looking at other information transmission channels.

This study investigates the moderating role of internal governance mechanisms in the relationship between audit quality and financial communication quality in the French context.

The purpose of this research paper is to investigate and model the fused deposition modelling (FDM) process to predict the mechanical attributes of 3D printed specimens.

By exploiting the main effect plots, a Taguchi L18 orthogonal array is used to investigate the effects of such parameters on three mechanical attributes of the 3D printed specimens. A radial-based integrated network is then developed to map the eight FDM parameters to the three mechanical attributes for both PEEK and PEKK. Such an integrated network maps and predicts the mechanical attributes through two consecutive phases that consist of several radial basis functions (RBFs).

Validated on a set of further experiments, the integrated network was successful in predicting the mechanical attributes of the 3D printed specimens. It also outperformed the well-known RBF network with an overall improvement of 24% in the coefficient of determination. The integrated network is also further validated by predicting the mechanical attributes of a medical-surgical implant (i.e. the MidFace Rim) as an application.

The main aim of this paper is to accurately predict the mechanical properties of parts produced using the FDM process. Such an aim requires modelling a highly dimensional space to represent highly nonlinear relationships. Therefore, a radial-based integrated network based on the combination of composition and superposition of radial functions is developed to model FDM using a limited number of data points.

The purpose of this paper is to create awareness of contributions made by just-in-time manufacturing (JIT) practice towards building performance measures in Indian manufacturing industry. Implications of JIT implementation issues in Indian manufacturing industry have been critically evaluated in this paper.

While conducting this study, survey of reasonable number of manufacturing organisations have been made so as to ascertain contributions made by JIT initiatives in the Indian manufacturing industries for achieving major performance measures. The correlations between various JIT implementation dimensions and performance parameters have been worked out by employing various statistical tools and bringing out significant factors contributing effectively towards achieving manufacturing performance measures.

The study divulges that attitude of management, participation of workers, relationship of organisation with suppliers and customers, adoption of latest manufacturing methods and successful adaptation of effective JIT initiatives can significantly contribute towards enhancing performance measures in the organisation. The study also reveals that the holistic JIT manufacturing methods outscore the traditional manufacturing practices towards improving the manufacturing performance. The study highlights that detailed JIT implementation over a reasonable period can greatly contribute towards achievement in performance of organisation.

The present study analyses the impact of JIT manufacturing method on performance of organisation and highlights the need for aligning organisational efforts in establishing manufacturing methods for attaining improvements in performance of manufacturing organisations. The paper highlighted the status of JIT manufacturing initiatives in the Indian context and the preparedness of Indian manufacturing industry to meet the challenges imposed by the Western world by employing aggressive JIT manufacturing strategies.